Do or Die by Barbara Fradkin Page B

far?”
    â€œThat Difalco’s data disappeared. Difalco accused Miller of erasing it from the computer and Miller accused Difalco of falsifying his results. At one point, it came to blows.”
    Halton nodded, his gaze still lowered. “That is the official version. I’m going to hold you to your word, detective. Not one word of what I’m about to tell you must leak beyond these walls, or the cause of my brain research will be set back years.”
    Green said nothing. From his desk, Halton picked up a polished wooden brain that resembled a shelled walnut, stained different hues. He cradled it in his large hands reverently. “Back in the 60’s, this was called the black box. After centuries of ludicrous theories trying to guess its inner workings, behavioural psychologists said ‘Don’t even try’. Concentrate on what goes in and what comes out. Stimulus and response. But that’s like buying a twelve-cylinder Lamborghini and never looking under the hood. From medical and biological research, we knew the basics of how functions are located in the brain.” He turned the brain and pointed as he talked. “Visual cortex in the back here, motor cortex, language in the left temporal lobe. We knew if the occipital lobe was damaged the person wouldn’t be able to see. Cut out his prefrontal lobe—like in a lobotomy—and you not only disconnect his emotions but he can’t plan or organize.”
    Halton split the wooden sphere in two and held each out dramatically. “There are two to three billion brain cells in here in the cortex alone. At least some are firing all the time, reacting to all the sights and sounds in this room, to the feel of my own body and the smell of the stale air conditioning. Put electrodes all over the scalp to record this electrical activity and they generate brain wave tracings called an EEG. Put enough electrodes, make them sensitive enough, filterthe waves through the proper computer program and you can detect the activity of a very small group of neurons. If you say a word, a tiny EEG spike shows up in this little section of the temporal lobe. That tiny spike is called an event-related potential, and it’s how we can map the functions of any part of the brain we want. We can see what parts of the brain become engaged when we ask it to do a particular task.
    â€œWe used to think every function had its own special corner of the brain, but we know now that’s it’s much more collaborative than that. Yes, there are specialized centres for different things, but there are also more neural connections from one to another than can be imagined.” Halton wrote something on a notepad and held it up. “Read this.”
    It was the word “cat”, and Green smiled in spite of himself. In his work, he’d seen more brains than he cared to, splattered on the floor beneath a corpse or laid bare by the pathologist’s saw. He found this abstract insight intriguing but sensed that the professor had lost his rare moment of humility and was settling back into his favourite role of Grand Poobah. To forestall this, even more than to hasten the interview, Green shook his head.
    â€œProfessor, I don’t—”
    Halton held up his hand sharply. “Now you bear with me, Detective. If you’re going to be running roughshod through the intricacies of my students’ work, I want you to understand the complexity of this organ, and the daunting challenge we face. Besides, you’ll never understand what you’re investigating without a bit of background.”
    Dutifully, Green said “cat” and Halton grinned. “Now, in your brain, the following probably just happened, all within two or three hundred milliseconds. The visual cortexdeciphered the shapes, said oh, letters, and pulled in the left temporal lobe to get the sounds to match the letters, then the millisecond you got the word ‘cat’,